High Performance Workload Management with IBM Platform LSF

IBM Platform LSF is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that enable you to utilize all of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal application performance.

Improve IT performance, reduce infrastructure costs, and meet the demand for faster time to market

HPC isn’t easy

Across enterprises of all sizes, application capability and data volumes continue to grow significantly, driving the need for more and more compute capacity and high performance management and analysis tools. Even in traditional high performance computing (HPC) environments, multiple compute silos, uneven processing, design cycle leaks and delayed results are common. Facing increasingly restrictive economic pressures, organizations are looking for better ways to improve IT performance, reduce infrastructure costs and expenses, and meet the demand for faster time to solution and market.

A comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features

Better, faster and smarter computing

The IBM® Platform™ LSF® product family is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed and mission-critical HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that enable you to take full advantage of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal application performance. A highly scalable and available architecture allows you to schedule complex workloads, and manage up to petaflop-scale resources.

Take full advantage of all your technical computing resources

Getting the most out of your systems

The Platform LSF product family helps you ensure that all available resources are fully utilized by enabling you to take full advantage of all technical computing resources—from application software licenses to available network bandwidth. The Platform LSF family can help:

Reduce operational and infrastructure costs by providing optimal SLA management and greater flexibility, visibility and control of job scheduling.

Improve productivity and resource sharing by fully utilizing hardware and application resources, whether they are just down the hall or halfway around the globe.

Products

Express

Standard

Advanced

is an advanced analysis and visualization tool for analyzing massive amounts of IBM Platform LSF and IBM Platform Symphony workload data. It enables you to correlate job, resource and license data from multiple clusters for data-driven decision-making.

provides a flexible, easy to use interface for cluster users and administrators. Available as an add-on module to IBM Platform LSF, Platform Application Center enables users to interact with intuitive, self-documenting standardized interfaces.

IBM High Performance Services provides a ready-to-run cluster in the cloud – complete with IBM Platform LSF workload management software, SoftLayer infrastructure and the support of a dedicated cloud operations team. With IBM High Performance Services organizations can implement a hybrid cloud environment, rapidly extending local infrastructure to physical, non-shared infrastructure in the SoftLayer cloud to quickly accommodate peaks in demand without being concerned about security or performance. IBM High Performance Services also provides on-demand ready-to-run cloud based Hadoop and EDA environments.

provides a management framework for the scheduling and movement of data within clusters, between clusters and to and from the cloud. An intelligent cache and out-of-band data transfers accelerates time to solution and eliminates wasted compute cycles.

turns static IBM Platform LSF clusters into dynamic, shared cloud infrastructure. By automatically changing the composition of clusters to meet ever-changing workload demands, service levels are improved and organizations can do more work with less infrastructure.

Complex scripts are often used to automate lengthy computing tasks. But these scripts can be risky to modify, and may depend on the expertise of a few key individuals. IBM Platform Process Manager simplifies the design and automation of complex computational processes, capturing and protecting repeatable best practices.

is designed to work with IBM Platform LSF® to provide high-throughput, low-latency scheduling in environments that run high-volumes of short-duration jobs and where users require faster and more predictable job turnaround times.

-

Complementary Products

IBM Spectrum Scale

To get the best performance out of workload running under IBM Platform LSF, or to transparently share file system data between clusters or data centers, IBM Spectrum Scale removes storage bottlenecks ensuring that resources are fully utilized and that applications run as quickly and reliably as possible.

IBM Platform Cluster Manager is easy-to-use, powerful lifecycle management for scale-out cluster environments. It scales from single clusters to complex multi-team environments and helps organizations to leverage a single infrastructure for multiple business needs. Featuring a unified interface for management and monitoring, it helps to improve administrator productivity through reduced cluster management complexity.

Using Platform LSF the studio technicians were able to complete the equivalent of over 17 million processor-hours of complex rendering in time to get the film released before the summer blockbuster season.